Sarah Haley, assistant professor of gender studies and African American studies at UCLA, received the 2016 Sara A. Whaley Prize for her new book, “No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity” (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). The National Women’s Studies Association presents this annual award and $2,000 prize to the best book in any field on women and labor from an intersectional perspective.
The publisher describes Haley's book:
"In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women’s brutalization in local, county and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners’ acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life.
"A landmark history of black women’s imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity."
